When Louis the Eleventh of France beheld his country exhausted by the predatory wars of England, he bought a peace of our Edward the Fourth by an annual sum of fifty thousand crowns, to be paid at London, and likewise granted _pensions_ to the English ministers. Holinshed and all our historians call this a yearly _tribute_; but Comines, the French memoir-writer, with a national spirit, denies that these _gifts_ were either _pensions_ or _tributes_. "Yet," says Bodin, a Frenchman also, but affecting a more philosophical indifference, "it must be either the one or the other; though I confess, that those who receive a pension to obtain peace, commonly boast of it _as if it were a tribute_!"[126] Such are the shades of our feelings in this history of taxation and tribute. But there is another artifice of applying soft names to hard things, by veiling a tyrannical act by a term which presents no disagreeable idea to the imagination. When it was formerly thought desirable, in the relaxation of morals which prevailed in Venice, to institute the office of _censor_, three magistrates were elected bearing this title; but it seemed so harsh and austere in that dissipated city, that these reformers of manners were compelled to change their title; when they were no longer called _censors_, but _I signori sopra il bon vivere della citta_, all agreed on the propriety of the office under the softened term. Father Joseph, the secret agent of Cardinal Richelieu, was the inventor of _lettres de cachet_, disguising that instrument of despotism by the amusing term of _a sealed letter_. Expatriation would have been merciful compared with the result of that _billet-doux_, a sealed letter from his majesty! Burke reflects with profound truth--"Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which, by way of eminence, becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of _taxing_. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of _money_ was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered."[127]